Skip to main content

Incremental Learning

  • Reference work entry
Encyclopedia of Biometrics

Synonyms

Adaptive learning; Online learning; Transfer learning

Definition

Incremental learning is a machine learning paradigm where the learning process takes place whenever new example(s) emerge and adjusts what has been learned according to the new example(s). The most prominent difference of incremental learning from traditional machine learning is that it does not assume the availability of a sufficient training set before the learning process, but the training examples appear over time.

Introduction

For a long time in the history of machine leaning, there has been an implicit assumption that a “good” training set in a domain is available a priori. The training set is so “good” that it contains all necessary knowledge that once learned, can be reliably applied to any new examples in the domain. Consequently, emphasis is put on learning as much as possible from a fixed training set. Unfortunately, many real-world applications cannot match this ideal case, such as in dynamic control...

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 449.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  1. Giraud-Carrier, C.G.: A note on the utility of incremental learning. AI Commun. 13(4), 215–224 (2000)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  2. Ourston, D., Mooney, R.J.: Theory refinement combining analytical and empirical methods. Artif. Intell. 66(2), 273–309 (1994)

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  3. Elman, J.L.: Learning and development in neural networks: The importance of starting small. Cognition 46(1), 71–99 (1993)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Cheng, L., Vishwanathan, S.V.N., Schuurmans, D., Wang, S., Caelli, T.: Implicit online learning with kernels. In: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 19, pp. 249–256. Vancouver, Canada (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Huo, Q., Lee, C.H.: On-line adaptive learning of the continuous density hidden markov model based on approximate recursive bayes estimate. IEEE Trans. Speech Audio Process. 5(2), 161–172 (1997)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Pan, S.J., Kwok, J.T., Yang, Q.: Transfer learning via dimensionality reduction. In: Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 677–682. Chicago, IL (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Cover, T.M., Hart, P.E.: Nearest neighbour pattern classification. Trans. Inf. Theory 13, 21–27 (1967)

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  8. Schlimmer, J.C., Fisher, D.H.: A case study of incremental concept induction. In: Proceedings of the National Conference on Artifical Intelligence, pp. 496–501. San Mateo, CA (1986)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Aha, D.W., Kibler, D.F., Albert, M.K.: Instance-based learning algorithms. Mach. Learn. 6, 37–66 (1991)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Syed, N.A., Liu, H., Sung, K.K.: Handling concept drifts in incremental learning with support vector machines. In: Proceedings of ACM International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, pp. 317–321. San Diego, CA (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Ross, D.A., Lim, J., Lin, R.S., Yang, M.H.: Incremental learning for robust visual tracking. Int. J. Comput. Vis. 77(1-3), 125–141 (2008)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Schlimmer, J.C., Granger, R.H.: Incremental learning from noisy data. Mach. Learn. 1(3), 317–354 (1986)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Zhou, Z.H., Chen, Z.: Hybrid decision tree. Knowl. Based Syst. 15(8), 515–528 (2002)

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

About this entry

Cite this entry

Geng, X., Smith-Miles, K. (2009). Incremental Learning. In: Li, S.Z., Jain, A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Biometrics. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-73003-5_304

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics